This thinking will be of cold comfort to the many residents who have already gone through years of stress as they watch their areas decline, topped off by being forced out by Compulsory Purchase Order.
I’m prepared to accept that there are many people who do okay out of this process but it’s not really their voices that I’ve been trying to capture here.
And any pastiche of Housing Market Renewal campaigners would be incomplete without Elizabeth Pascoe, who – along with a group of neighbours – fought unsuccessfully through two public inquiries and numerous high court hearings to prevent her home from being bulldozed as part of a road-widening scheme.
Elizabeth was forced to leave her home off Edge Lane, Liverpool, in March this year and her house may well have been cleared by now. New housing in its place will be funded by HMR.
Or will it?
None of the nine HMR Pathfinder schemes running across the North of England has any funding agreed beyond the current 2010-11 financial year. The Tories haven’t said a huge amount about what they plan to do but it’s possible that a change in government – not to mention the UK’s huge public sector deficit – could herald a change in direction for the programme.
Over to Elizabeth. [** apologies in advance for the extremely ropey audio here. This was recorded before I honed my skills with some training with duckrabbit]